False-positive-free SVD-based image watermarking

•The main drawback of the SVD-based image watermarking is its false positive problem.•A new SVD-based image watermarking is proposed to address the above issue.•Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to former schemes.

The need of copyright protection and rightful ownership become very urgent in the fast growing Internet environment. The watermarking offers a convenient way to hide specific information via an imaging system for the consumer electronic devices such as digital camera, scanner, and printer. Numerous efforts have been devoted in the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD)-based image watermarking schemes which embed the visual watermark image into the host image before publishing for public usage. However, the main drawback of the SVD-based image watermarking is its false positive problem of which an attacker can easily claim and obtain the correct watermark from an unauthorized image. In this paper, we proposed a new SVD-based image watermarking by embedding the principal component of a watermark into the host image of block based manner using spread spectrum concept. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method overcomes the false positive problem, achieves a high payload, and outperforms the former reliable SVD-based watermarking.